Palin – Not Ready for Primetime?

September 9, 2008 at 5:25 pm (politics)
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Amidst the upsurge in enthusiasm for the McCain-Palin ticket as a result of last week’s Republican convention, many probably missed a notable absence on the Sunday morning talk shows.  While Obama, Biden, and McCain were on each of the three major networks, Palin was no where to be found, not even on the Republican mouthpiece, Fox News!

A McCain campaign adviser said Palin would not appear until reporters showed a willingness to treat her with “with some level of respect and deference.”

What?

Even if it was true that reporters are not sufficiently respectful or deferential, the appropriate response is not to go into hiding.  Are we to get the impression that this self-styled pitbull is all bark and no bite?  Will this be Palin’s modus operandi in dealing with foreign leaders or even Congress – promise to compliment her hair and then she’ll talk?

The patent absurdity of this excuse underlies the true reason – Palin just doesn’t have the depth to answer even softball questions.  Further, if what I blogged about her before is any indication, she’s prone to making some embarassing factual gaffes.

And this is the person McCain believes is ready to be the next president at a moment’s notice.  Honestly, I’m not sure which of the two is worse: the one severely lacking in judgement, or the one severely lacking in experience.

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Palin needs a course in American history

September 3, 2008 at 11:46 am (politics, society)
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The website Fundies Say the Darndest Things! (linked to the left) is a treasure trove of absolute batshit crazy statements from the religious faithful.  While being stupendously funny, they’re also a mite sobering when you realize that they’re made in full seriousness.

While perusing through this month’s entries, I read the following gem:

11. Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?

Sarah Palin: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

Sarah Palin, in case you’ve been buried in a cave for the past week, is John McCain’s recent choice for running mate, and potential Vice President (not to mention President…).  The “oopsie!” is of course not the obvious grammar mistakes, but the fact that the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance was not added until 1954.  And it was not written by the Founding Fathers, but by a Christian socialist minister in 1892.  Curiously, the source page for the above quote was deleted, but nothing ever truly disappears off the internet.  A simple search of the page on Google retrieved it from cache.

Frankly, it doesn’t much surprise me that the evangelical Christan Palin holds this mistaken view of American history.  Ask any such Christian, and they’ll offer up a wholly revisionist history of the country’s founding, claiming, among other things, that it was established as a Christian nation (it wasn’t) and that the Ten Commandments inspired American law (sorry, no good there, either).

Palin holds a worldview that doesn’t seem all that dissimilar from the current president’s.  Is that a good thing?  I guess it depends on your view of how the past 8 years have gone.

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